To everything a season: bioenergetics in seasonal environments

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Seasonality is an annual cycle comprised of wave-like variation in photoperiod - short then long then short again - and temperature - cold then warm then cold again. Seasons are fundamentally important to plants, animals, and people because light, snow, resources, and temperature have fundamental impacts on organismal function and interactions. But research tends to be conducted across only a fraction of the annual cycle and most ecological and evolutionary theory has ignored seasons and seasonality. We use a combination of laboratory, field, and modeling approaches to identify the ecological and evolutionary consequences of animal energetics (the process by which animals acquire and assimilate energy from the environment, and allocate assimilated energy between maintenance, growth, and reproduction). Our research is uniquely able to obtain integrated measures of the energy availability, acquisition, and expenditure of free--ranging wildlife and to embed these bioenergetic measures into a well-resolved life history and ecological context. The long-term objective of my Discovery Grant research program is to understand how bioenergetics filters environmental variation into the distribution, abundance and coexistence of wildlife populations within natural landscapes. Over the next five years, we will focus on seasonality and testing the hypothesis that, if wildlife populations are characterized by differential responses to environmental variation, changes in the duration and intensity of seasonal phases will alter the seasonal responses, interaction strengths, periods of advantage, and the persistence of wildlife populations. Field research will focus on four distinct predator--prey systems (lynx-coyote-hare-red squirrel in southwest Yukon, ungulates-large predators in North Yukon, meso-carnivores and their prey in Adirondacks, the social-ecology of local Indigenous food systems in Northern Quebec), all situated in boreal and/or subarctic environments, and all involving simultaneous monitoring of multiple predators and their alternative prey. In each system, and across all four systems, we will evaluate support for the differential seasonal response hypothesis as well as advance system-specific knowledge and the application of new knowledge to conservation action. Studying multiple systems in a similar manner allows generality to be assessed, specificities to be identified, and impact shared. This proposed research advances knowledge related to the physiology, behaviour, ecology, evolution, and natural history of northern wildlife and people, and how these inter-related aspects of biology combine with seasonality to determine the susceptibility of northern systems to environmental change.